Actors and Audiences: Intermedial Mirror

Abstract

The iconic image of an Elizabethan performance space is that of players projecting on a platform, surrounded by the spectators.¹ Unlike later actors, who tended to take refuge behind a proscenium arch with their spectators hidden in the dark, Elizabethan players and their public were fully exposed to each other. Indeed, performing in broad daylight on an open stage they were drawn to acknowledge each other’s presence. In such playing conditions, they inevitably revealed and recognised their own theatricality.

This is and is not Cressid.

Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.153

For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show

Hamlet, 1.2.84–5